“… illuminating though Heise’s account is, the allegorical method frequently leads to the eclipse of the characters by the ideas that Heise pins to them. Here, for example, is a passage describing aspects of Siegfried’s encounter with the dragon:
‘Brünnhilde, representing the unconscious mind and its special
language, music, (in which the music-dramatist Siegfried - i.e.
Wagner - will instinctively attempt to repress dangerous knowledge
which is rising to consciousness within us, and particularly within
him), will be the secular artist’s substitute for lost religious faith. As
such, it will be the artist’s substitute for the fear of knowledge, the
basis of faith, which protected the faithful from examining the
religious mysteries which, as Feuerbach expressed so well, they had
involuntarily and unconsciously invented in the first place. Since the
music-dramatist Siegfried is going to unwittingly deliver the death
blow to religious faith (Fafner), in taking responsibility for guarding
the Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard which Siegfried will soon inherit, he
must also take responsibility for keeping Wotan’s unspoken secret.’
There is truth in that account, which decodes some of the hidden messages that have been buried in the drama. But it prompts the response that Siegfried is not a music-dramatist, but an orphaned hero, that Fafner is something more, and also something less, than a symbol of religious faith, being a relict of an ancient deal that went wrong, a resume of all the accumulated obstacles that lie in any hero’s path and a symbol of the inertia that lies at the heart of human affairs. It reminds us too that Brünnhilde, even if she was, for Wagner, an epitome of the spirit of music, is also a Valkyrie, one who has surrendered her godhead out of pity for a mortal, and who has arranged her own future with breathtaking intelligence before sleeping on the plan. To put the point in a somewhat Leavisite way, Heise’s reading of the cycle, full of insights though it is, puts cabbalistic decipherment in place of a critical response.” [P. 191-192]
Again, the problem with Scruton’s critique is that he assumes that seeing Wagner’s characters as both realistic characters in a drama, and as allegorical figures carrying a universal meaning, is contradictory, as if these distinct visions are mutually exclusive. My interpretation constantly treats Wagner’s protagonists on both levels of analysis, much like Scruton’s own Kantian notion that we can understand ourselves both as transcendent subjects, or “I”, and as contingent objects (it) subject to natural law. For instance, my allegorical interpretation subsumes Scruton’s description of Fafner as being not only a “… symbol of religious faith …,” but also “… a relict of an ancient deal that went wrong, a resume of all the accumulated obstacles that lie in any hero’s path and a symbol of the inertia that lies at the heart of human affairs.” My allegorical interpretation of Fafner doesn’t contradict or omit these characterizations, but embraces them. Scruton’s misconstruction of the scope and explanatory power of my allegory is particularly evident in his choice of an excerpt drawn from the heart of my online Ring book to illustrate how far removed my allegorical reading is from an audience’s common-sense understanding of Wagner’s protagonists. What he doesn’t relay here is not only how my book gradually introduces the allegedly burdensome allegorical overlay which he finds in the passage he chose, ripped out of context from the middle of my book, and works its way up from simplicity to complexity, but he also neglects to quote any
